Apple loses its top AI models executive to Meta’s hiring spree

AI·AppleApple loses its top AI models executive to Meta’s hiring spreeBY Mark GurmanBY BloombergBY Mark GurmanBY BloombergMeta AI at the Meta pavilion ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan

Hollie Adams—Bloomberg via Getty ImagesApple Inc. ’s top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc. , another setback in the iPhone maker’s struggling AI efforts

Ruoming Pang, a distinguished engineer and manager in charge of the company’s Apple foundation models team, is departing, according to people with knowledge of the matter

Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc

In 2021, is the big hire for Meta’s new superintelligence team, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves

To secure Pang, Meta offered a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year, the people said

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring spree, bringing on major AI leaders including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, startup founder Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman with high compensation

Meta on Monday also hired Yuanzhi Li, a reer from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Claude at Anthropic PBC, according to other people with knowledge of the matter

Apple and Pang didn’t immediately respond to a request for

In June, Apple announced that those models would be opened up to third-party developers for the first time, allowing for a range of new iPhone and iPad apps

But internally, the foundation models team has come under scrutiny from new leadership, which is exploring the use of third-party models, including from either OpenAI or Anthropic, to power a new version of Siri

Those internal discussions have soured some of the morale on the foundation models team, also known as AFM, in recent weeks

Read More: Apple Weighs Using Outside AI to Power Siri in Major Shift While the company has explored a move to a third-party solution to power the AI in the new Siri, it has simultaneously been working on a new version of Siri based on the models developed by Pang’s group

Those models also power Apple Intelligence features that run on Apple devices including and web article summaries, Genmoji and Priority Notifications

The major departure, the most significant in Apple’s AI ranks since the company started working on Apple Intelligence a few years ago, underscores the heightened competition for talent in the emerging space

Pang’s departure could be the start of a string of exits from the AFM group, with several engineers telling colleagues they are planning to leave in the near future to Meta or elsewhere, the people said

Tom Gunter, a top deputy to Pang, left Apple last month, Bloomberg reported at the time

The foundation models team reports to Daphne Luong, a top deputy to AI senior vice president John Giannandrea

Earlier this year, Giannandrea was sidelined internally and saw Siri, robotics, Core ML frameworks and other consumer duct-related teams stripped from his command

That came after a poor response to Apple Intelligence and frequent delays for new Siri features

With Pang’s departure, the AFM team will now be run by Zhifeng Chen

In a change from a structure under Pang where most of the engineers reported to him directly, there will be a new organizational layout that includes multiple managers reporting to Chen, who will then have engineers reporting to them

People close to the team indicate that Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu and Guoli Yin could be possible managers in the new structure

Read More: Meta Adds Startup Founder Gross to New AI Superintelligence Lab Apple’s AI strategy is now run primarily by Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who helped create the Apple Vision headset and now leads engineering for Siri

For his part, Giannandrea is in charge of Apple’s AI re arm

In June, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s own AI only got a small showing, appearing in new features for translating calls and text messages

The few other AI features, including analysis of on-device screenshots and imved image generation, came courtesy of partners, including OpenAI and Google

The company also rolled out a new version of Xcode that can handle code completion by tapping into Claude and ChatGPT

Explore this year's list.